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Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? 480

Posted by Soulskill from the risk-is-not-our-business dept.
eldavojohn writes "I have a slightly older friend who played through the glory days of Ultima Online. Yes, their servers are still up and running, but he often waxes nostalgic about certain gameplay functions of UO that he misses. I must say that these aspects make me smile and wonder what it would be like to play in such a world — things like housing, thieving and looting that you don't see in the most popular massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. So, I've followed him through a few games, including Darkfall and now Mortal Online. And these (seemingly European developed) games are constantly fading into obscurity and never catching hold. We constantly move from one to the next. Does anyone know of a popular three-dimensional game that has UO-like rules and gameplay? Perhaps one that UO players gravitated to after leaving UO? If you think that the very things that have been removed (housing and thieving would be two good topics) caused WoW to become the most popular MMO, why is that? Do UO rules not translate well to a true 3D environment? Are people incapable of planning for corpse looting? Are players really that inept that developers don't want to leave us in control of risk analysis? I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested."
X

After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out 79

Posted by timothy from the terminal-velocity dept.
The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."

Comment Hobbit / Xymon with Devmon (Score 2, Informative) 342

by gudmo (#28638167) Attached to: What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System?
The solution is real simple. If you can program in anything then Hobbit/Xymon with Devmon is your only choice.
Create your own Weather Map for 2D, you never need a full 2D map of 5000 hosts... Less is more.

1. Free
2. Fully customizable
3. Easy administration
4. Offers clients for all the major OS (And quite a few minor ones)
5. Large support base (Users with high technical level)
6. Nice author (Replies to comments and considers all ideas)
7. You can write a test for anything you can think of and easily add it into hobbit
8. Offers client/server montoring, remote monitoring, script monitoring, snmp monitoring(devmon) or scripts

The possibilities with Hobbit are endless

Personally I use Hobbit to monitor over 2400 devices, including Cisco hardware, AIX, Windows Servers, VMware Clusters, Exchange, Sharepoint etc.etc.etc.etc.
I've never encountered a system I could not monitor with Hobbit (Or scripts that send their results into hobbit).
Games

Designing Difficulty Options In Games 110

Posted by Soulskill from the say-no-to-battletoads dept.
Gamasutra is running a story about how the "hard" modes in games can be designed to include difficulty, but not frustration. They give some examples of the changes made to several games as their difficulty settings are increased, and they discuss some of the simple options, such as increasing the number of required button presses, or increasing the relevant numbers by an arbitrary amount (a boss on easy may hit you for 10 damage, whereas a boss on hard may act the same but hit you for 100 damage). They also talk about maintaining the "illusion of fairness." Quoting: "Bungie's Halo series is often praised for its excellent execution of difficult play in the form of its Legendary mode. Not surprisingly, the team took a very well-thought out approach to introducing and tuning difficult play. Halo 3 gameplay designer Francois Boucher-Genesse explains that it's not just a case of one formula fits all. 'It's not like we just cranked every enemy's health by 200% and called it Legendary,' he said. 'There was a good amount of custom changes made per mission as well. In that sense we encourage players with previous Halo experience to play at least on Heroic, since they get to see the game in its full scale.'"

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